The present application relates generally to geocoding, and, more particularly to methods, systems and computer program products for accurately locating geographical coordinates based on a textually identified location.
Many conventional geographic information systems (GISs) rely upon the process of geocoding, which is the translation of a textually identified location into a pair of geographical coordinates. The textually identified location may be, for example, a physical street address, and the geographic coordinates may be, for example, a longitude/latitude pair.
The source of the textually identified location is typically a human source and, thus, the GIS must typically have the capacity to deal with human error. For example, many streets are known by different names or differing variations of the same name. The street name may be misspelled, portions of the street name may be omitted, directional tags may be misplaced or omitted, for example, “Elm St East” may be called “East Elm St”, or simply “Elm St”, and/or the thoroughfare type, such as “street”, “road”, avenue”, “court”, and the like, may be incorrect or not provided.
Conventional applications which need to geocode potentially incorrect street addresses typically perform an exact search, possibly followed by a second, expanded search that may omit the need for all portions of the address to match exactly. In an urban setting, the second search quite often finds numerous matches, any one of which can be the correct street. This may result in additional, unnecessary geocoding errors.